Drive: a thriving market

Interview with Pierre Cailleux

Pierre Cailleux is Digital Retail Director. He joined the company in August 2015.

Nearly one-third of the retail chains ranked in the Top 500 guide now offer customers the option to Buy Online and Pick up In Store (BOPIS), according to Internet Retailer. Lots of Drive concepts are emerging, adapted to specialized businesses or specific areas. The Drive market is a rather dynamic market. With more than 10 years of experience, Worldline is particularly well positioned on this expertise.

Can you talk to us about the Drive market and its prospects?

For customers, the Drive consists in placing an online order to pick it up at a given location, and for merchants, the Drive is literally a Drive-Thru. Today, this model is being used in different sectors such as restaurants, florists and banks; but it is still the major retailers that fuel this market. For them, Drives are a way to densify their geographical network, to boost their visits, and therefore their sales volume.

Several types of Drive coexist; does that mean that each is tied to its own strategy?

Indeed, there are Drives attached to existing physical points of sales, Pick-Up Drives, and Solo Drives built next to a warehouse and completely detached from a pre-existing point of sale. The Pick-Up Drive is the leading type of Drive. Solo Drives are at the core of Chronodrive’s business, a pure player from the French group Auchan.

What are the key success factors of a Drive strategy?

They are the same key success factors of an existing point-of sale: firstly location and service quality, the majority of customers wishing to pick up their orders in less than 3 hours; then the assortment, the main focus being the ability for customers to find the products they are looking for; finally, the interactivity, the online ordering process has to be simple, intuitive or even playful, personalized and enhanced with promotions.

What are the specific features of the Drive service?

Products assortment, their rotation, local market specificities and customer demands, to name a few. Worldline worked with the first Drive pure player in France. We developed its e-Commerce platform, from order taking to payment, including merchandising, promotions and customer targeting. We have an expertise of more than 10 years, our platform manages 25 million transactions per year related to food e-commerce, and we absorb regular traffic peaks of more than 4,000 orders per hour, so we secure sales of 150,000 items in one hour.

In your opinion, will the Drive concept evolve?

Yes, certainly since the Drive is a hot topic nowadays. This model accompanies the major retail stakeholders in their evolution since they are implementing it in their local networks.

Walmart’s enthusiasm towards this model, the opening of marketplaces allowing third-party merchants to take advantage of already-established distribution networks and the recurrence of Drive purchases ... For sure, the development of Drive services is in the making.

Thank you for your time today, Pierre. I will leave you with one final question: in your opinion, what will be the invention/innovation that will change our world in a century?

What comes to mind are cybernetics applied to the improvement of human performance or as compensation for the loss of a limb or abilities: the fusion between the human body and technology, from the connected tattoo for tekkies to the most advanced prosthesis that would really replace a lost limb. For example, it could be a mobile phone, powered by our body and directly integrated into our arm or our ear, but that could also give their sight back to the visually-impaired.

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